Driving on the Rim

17

MY RECENT CONSCIENTIOUSNESS about tending my parents’ graves had proven to be a consolation, as though I were tucking them in. When I saw others at the cemetery I began to theorize that this was a universal feeling — those people with pruning shears and watering cans had become serenely familiar. From time to time, one or another of us would simply sit down next to a headstone and weep with cleansing ordinariness, before getting briskly back to work, tidying up, trimming, tending. I did so a couple of times, until it finally became part of my no-contest attitude: The Floater, coming to a theater near you. I became increasingly aware of the landscape of a small-town cemetery with its trees and weather and purposeful visitors. As I had seen others do, the time came for me to move out of the vicinity of my own graves and see what was what. Hands plunged in pockets, an amiable and bemused expression on my face, the well-executed passing nods — all plausibly put the lie to the mission I was so slow to admit: I was looking for the grave of Cody Worrell.

At the time of the funeral I was so comfortable with my part in things that I’d attended as a kind of tourist, just curious. I did remember that it was a nice day and I enjoyed that. I had always been remarkably sensitive to and moved by weather. I remembered the zephyrs that fluttered the cottonwood leaves so attractively and the little cavalcade of ill-dressed people with their prematurely old faces. That carelessness, my almost aerial contentment, things having turned out as I supposed they should, I now saw as one of the lagging indicators of my prolonged adolescence. Whatever comfort I’d enjoyed, whatever pleasure I’d taken in the day, was now gone. I began to feel tormented by my part in Cody’s death almost immediately after the funeral. And the thought remained: something was wrong with me. My indignation about the abuse of his young wife, my irresistible incentive, seemed to fade; I tried to revive it, but it returned as simple sadness, insufficient incentive for what I had done. I even caught myself angry at her for having been so hapless. I thought I had better put an end to this line of thinking before I started blaming her to get myself off the hook. No matter how I went at it, the issue would remain twisted inside me until I did something about it. That last moment of innocence in Cody’s face… unbearable.

I found his grave quite easily and, I suppose, from memory — on the expanding edge of the cemetery where the trees were smaller and the direct sun starker. From here, too, the houses of the living were more eminent and unaccountably intrusive. I sensed the distinct peacefulness of the old cemetery lost in this funereal sprawl. In any case, there they were, another surprise: the two graves. I had not recalled that the young couple had been buried side by side forever. Perhaps it was because I came to their funeral only out of morbid interest as to whether or not anyone missed him, and the peculiar pleasure of attending incognito when I was the reason all the rest of them were there. But here they were, the young couple, side by side. It wouldn’t be long before their brutal history would be subsumed in forgetfulness. She might reappear as the shy bride or he on his first bicycle. I would have to go on wondering what had impelled her repeated availing of herself to his rages. Then or now, I didn’t care what had inflamed him. His abuse was sufficiently prolonged to accord him opportunity for change, but he never missed a step.

For my part, this review of the facts was just whistling in the dark. I had, as was said, taken the law into my own hands. My father, when describing the pleasure he took in shooting Germans, said that we came from a long line of people who shot first and asked questions later. But I knew perfectly well that he had arrived at this only when seeing friends fall had made his accustomed humanity vanish in anger. I recall him admitting his surprise at how easily charity could slip away. He had thought it was a bit more enduring. Apparently that surprised all those soldiers, especially infantrymen. They had initially admired the Wehrmacht for its efficiency, but as their friends were mowed down their hatred grew in detail. My father recalled the first time he tipped up the head of a dead German soldier for the purpose of guessing his age. He remembered thinking “somewhere around fourteen,” which disturbed him anew, undermined his anger. At the time of that recollection, I was helping him repair our unreliable furnace, and he held the big red pipe wrench in his hand as his eyes drifted off: it was all quite present to him, the burning figment of the boy in the Wehrmacht helmet, my father’s boot under his chin.

I may have been enduring the same fear, the eventual acknowledgment that in suspending the rules of humanity for the convenience of emotion we gave way to wickedness; at a bare minimum, we were in error. The matching headstones with their chiseled hearts encouraged my view that everything real was eventually reduced to human contrivance. As I walked back through the old cemetery to my car, every inscription seemed lurid with deceit.

I supposed that I was guilty.

I noticed that Jocelyn was limping. Otherwise she had changed little since I’d seen her in the White Sulphur Springs hospital — the same nice crow’s-feet that seemed to intensify her gaze, the same slightly weathered quality of some good-looking women entering middle age. Her expression was, I guess, amusement at our turning up like this. However, she caught my glance. We had stopped at a steak joint, the Trail Head, just off the interstate. “Yes,” she said, “it’s permanent.” We went inside and were given a table.

Jocelyn shrugged off her Windbreaker. Underneath she wore a snap-button shirt that seemed somewhat incongruous with her cotton skirt, but her vitality made it work and would probably have made anything work. If I’d taken her to one of our clinic get-togethers, I would have been afraid the wives would have found her a little tough even as they noticed their husbands’ interest with irritation.

I said, “I’m happy to see you again. But I’m surprised.”

She smiled and didn’t say anything right away. “I expected to be well received. Weren’t you flirting with me at the hospital?”

“Was I?”

She burst out laughing. “Oh, never mind!”

Anyway, our drinks arrived, whatever they were. It didn’t matter what was in them: I was slipping into a trance. But not an entirely guileless trance. I was already trying to imagine how I might avoid telling Jocelyn about my problems. A doctor hoping to have charges reduced to manslaughter didn’t seem like much of a catch. There was hardly anyone in the restaurant on this off night, and the sparseness seemed to isolate us. I felt something happening to me and would have appreciated some background noise.

“I’m not in Texas anymore. I’m back in Two Dot. My father died.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know that.”

“Well, he was ninety. I think he had long since figured there’s worse things than dying. He wouldn’t leave the place, kept mortgaging it to pay nurses. It was a mess. I couldn’t fly anymore, not ag flying, because I was no longer insurable. So now it’s my place, for better or worse.”

“Well, I’m sorry. It’s always tough.”

“Not in this case. He was a mean old man.”

Our food came, a couple of little steaks and salad. Jocelyn said, “You’re watching me eat!”

“Was I?”

“Yes! You were looking at my mouth! Okay, you try it. I’ll watch your mouth while you try to eat that steak. You’ll never get it down. It’ll just get bigger the longer you chew it.”

We talked about our situations: I suggested that I was on some sort of leave of absence, which went unquestioned; she was struggling with what to do with her dad’s old place. The restaurant began to fill up, and I knew most of the people who came in, though nobody stopped at our table. Several stared at Jocelyn. You could just feel the atmosphere going downhill.

Jocelyn said, “Let’s get out of here. Your neighbors don’t look friendly.” She started toward the front door. I left a few bills on the table as we arose and noticed that the room had nearly filled with other diners and they were staring. The waitress had been somewhat formal, I thought. Several men were observing Jocelyn walk. She had a somewhat grand manner that made the limp somehow fabulous. At least I thought so.

It was still light outside. Main Street with its rows of angle-parked automobiles and old storefronts seemed to frame the snowcapped peaks to the north. A few diners stood in front of the restaurant, hunched up against the cool air, nervously getting cigarettes out of the way so that they could go back inside and eat. Jocelyn’s truck was parked in front of the bank; it was a small Japanese vehicle with Texas plates, mud right up to the windows.

“Did you forget what you did with your car?” she asked.

“No, no, it’s just over there.”

“Well, hop in it and go home. I’ll see you when I see you.”

I felt myself to be under suspicion at the clinic. My former bravado was gone, and I quickly realized how much I wanted to work, having no other source of income — though I lived cheaply. The savings of course would suffice, but I’d always thought I was saving for some as-yet-undetermined scheme. Still, I had tried for a short time to maintain my practice, and I had been genuinely touched by the patients who persisted in seeing me, because they thought I was either innocent or had good reason to murder Tessa. The latter had its disquieting side, as Tessa had come to seem something of a town pest. I was not reassured when Adelaide Compton, whose dermatitis had forced her to discontinue giving piano lessons, said of Tessa, and in a congratulatory tone, “Good riddance.” I could only smile weakly while writing a prescription for cortisone cream.

In the end, it was out of my hands. The clinic partners were called to a special meeting where Dr. McAllister spoke, ostensibly to the whole group but really to me. He began with a peroration on compliance, expectations, work environment, and duty to the community, which could have applied equally to the space program and the whaling industry, before giving it up and speaking directly to me. Holding one wing of his bow tie between thumb and forefinger, he let it be known that all the clinic partners assumed that I was innocent but that for the good of all it would be best if I awaited the outcome of my trial or hearing before resuming work; and that in the meantime it would be no great matter if the “team”—had we ever used this term before? — took up my patient load.

I guess in my exasperation I had given some flippant advice to my more trying patients and they had gone to the board. A hypochondriac who kept demanding an explanation for all his imaginary ailments I diagnosed with Saint Vitus’ Dance. A cowboy whose wife had complained of his crude erotic approach I urged to give mounting the same respect it is given in horsemanship. A water bed was no cure for undulant fever. And so forth and so on. I should have kept my mouth shut.

I think my first impulse was to hang on like a bulldog in a thunderstorm, but the folly of that was soon clear and I consented with a show of magnanimity that produced great relief in the room, including not a few audible sighs. Voluble noise filled the room, and everyone gathered around me with our old amiable muddle. When Dr. Haack joshingly punched me in the shoulder and asked, “Well, did you do it or not?” the room fell abruptly still as all eyes turned toward me.

I just smiled.

I got plenty of cold shoulders, but Jinx continued to see me. I don’t think she was explicitly lonely, but she was so opinionated that not everyone considered her good company. We went pretty far back together, back to when my astonishingly callow behavior attracted few allies, let alone social contacts. She had me over for one of her expert suppers, a beautiful entrecôte de veau with braised garden vegetables and a bottle of Côte-Rôtie that I don’t think she could have readily afforded. Her small house felt like the most cosmopolitan apartment filled with books, none, so far as I could tell, medical or scientific. The books were in cases except where they were stacked near a worn armchair, places marked with bits of paper. There was just one room where one could sit apart from the dining room, and its floor was nearly covered by a worn but beautiful Samarkand rug. Two rows of old novels were divided by a brown radio.

At table, we clinked glasses and let the unspoken be unspoken, though Jinx signified a little with a prolonged glance. I let it go right by me, not eager to thicken the atmosphere. I was quite resigned to my current fatalism. I had spent too much of my existence at manipulation and had at long last turned myself over to the world, savoring a sort of peace I had never before experienced. This was zeal in its most serene and contradictory form. I was self-sufficient and a good doctor, but this was my greatest achievement. Once I’d accepted that I was guilty and a criminal, the skies cleared.

“Are you making good use of your sabbatical?” Jinx asked while directing a faultfinding gaze at the food she had placed on the table. “I could use one myself. Later we can discuss whatever saga you are generating at the moment. Tell me what you think of this wine?”

“Didn’t I say anything already?”

“You only peered into it and sniffed.”

“Well, it’s fantastic. I suppose you sent away for it.”

Just then, her world seemed sad and orderly. Jinx could have used some of the disarray that currently lay over my days. Being useful to the end seemed insufficient. Whether this was a proclivity or an excuse I couldn’t have said, so consumingly focused was I on the food and wine. I hoped there would be plenty of the latter, as I planned to get drunk. Very often that gave me the feeling of falling in love with Jinx and at the same time feeling I mustn’t. I wondered why. Already I was feeling something very much like love for her. Sometimes it didn’t wear off, either. I must have been crazy.

Out of work, I took an extreme interest in the newspaper. I spent extraordinary time in one surmise after another based on the minutes of the commissioners’ meetings or the most opaque remarks of the mayor or, best of all, the “courthouse blotter,” where all things human from burglary to skunk removal to missing cats could be found on any given day. And with almost fatal gravity I was drawn as I had not been in many years to the classified ads and finally to that grim, black river of type labeled “Employment Opportunities.” Here was where I discovered Mr. and Mrs. Haines, who wished to have their house painted but, as I learned, had a limited budget to do so. Here also was where I imagined plunging into my own past, since the future was currently impaired.

As I looked the house over while awaiting an answer to the doorbell, I estimated it had not been painted since it was built, and it was a very old house. Mrs. Haines came to the door, opening it just wide enough to see out, then invited me in upon learning my business. She was a tiny white-haired woman, in her seventies I guessed, and quite excited to have a guest. I soon met her husband, a more phlegmatic type, who sat next to his ashtray in the breakfast nook that looked into the small backyard, which contained several well-tended raised flower beds. The house seemed to have had all the care that money couldn’t buy — clean, worn, and orderly — a small sequestered homebody’s niche.

Mrs. Haines did all the talking. Mr. Haines occasionally lifted a hand to add something but seemed to forget or change his mind, and the hand dropped to the table. Luckily, neither of the Haineses seemed to know who I was. I summarized what painting experience I could remember from long ago days and applied myself to winning their confidence. Within an hour, I was back with paint chips and insincerely applauded the good taste of the Haineses as they selected Chantilly Pearl with Spicy Chrysanthemum for the trim. I declined a deposit. Mrs. Haines was clear about what they were willing to pay. I accepted immediately because, euphoric about the prospect of scraping and painting their house, I was fretful that something beyond my control, like the weather, would delay me.

About a week later, Jocelyn called and asked if I wanted to see her place. I said that I did. It turned out she was already in town, and so she picked me up in her truck. I’m not sure why she wanted me to see it, although I began to suspect that it was to give her some advice about selling it. More than once she said, “You’re from around here.” We went through Big Timber, where the wind was blowing hard and the pedestrians were not only holding on to their hats but clutching themselves with a free hand to keep their coats from blowing open. Some students from the university were working in a vacant lot, what had been the Chinatown in the days of building the railroad. “I love this road to Harlowton,” Jocelyn said as we headed north. “Everything so open. Once you get used to seeing a long way it’s hard to accept anything less.” There was little activity on the ranches — wheel line sprinklers idled in cropped meadows, cows alone, bulls sequestered in corrals now that breeding season was over. I knew the calves were in the Midwest bloating on corn and antibiotics, quite offensive to a doctor accustomed to watching the corn lobby’s assault on American health.

We turned west up the Musselshell Valley toward Martinsdale and Two Dot. It was more tucked-away country, and Jocelyn drove slowly, seeming to examine every hill, every watercourse. She sighed and looked troubled. She reached over and held my hand. I can hardly say how I felt: I stared straight through the windshield and the empty sagebrush hills and sensed my breath was leaving me. She released my hand and returned hers to the wheel. I asked what she was thinking about and she said, “Riding the school bus.”

The road into the ranch left the pavement between two small hills, marked by a rusty mailbox with a cattle brand painted on its side. Once leaving the highway, it descended toward the river bottom, and a sprawl of buildings and worn-out farm machinery was visible around a grove of cottonwoods. An old railroad flatcar served as a bridge across the small river, and beyond was seemingly endless rangeland. She pulled up in front of the house. “I grew up here.”

It was a poor excuse for a single-story house, once white and now something else. On its small and uncovered porch sat an old TV with a kicked-in screen. A large farm thermometer with the profile of a cow gave anyone using the front door the bad news. Several sagging wires led to the house from nearby poles.

As soon as we had parked, the door opened and a lanky male in his thirties stepped out next to the TV and proclaimed that there wasn’t a damn thing to eat in the house except half a jar of peanut butter and one egg and that he hoped Jocelyn had brought groceries “or either” he’d like the car keys now. He wore Wrangler jeans, scuffed boots, and a black T-shirt, and his straight hair hung down to his collarbone. Despite oddly flat lips, he was a distinctive-looking character with a riveting set of crooked teeth.

Jocelyn said in a low voice, “That’d be your average Womack. If I’d taken better care of Womack, he might not be so whiney, but that’s water under the bridge now. And of course he’s got a point: you can’t do much with peanut butter and an egg.” Now Womack was among us.

Womack said to me, not altogether warmly, “You must be the doctor.”

“I must be.”

He extended a limp but calloused hand and said, “I hadn’t had the pleasure.”

Jocelyn said, “There’s groceries in the back, Crybaby. You want to get them?”

I followed Jocelyn into the house. I believe this was the first house I’d ever seen with standing ashtrays like those of an old-time hotel lobby. On the floor was a large parti-colored hide rug, which Jocelyn explained was Rags, her father’s boyhood horse. Newspapers and magazines were stacked nearly to the sill of the window that looked into the yard and through which I could see Womack coming in with the groceries.

Jocelyn bade me follow her into a room whose door was shut. She held it for me and I went into a small space with a pipe-frame bed, walls covered with children’s drawings of flowers, horses, deer, dogs, and cats — in a kind of evolution that included posters for Kiss, Guns N’ Roses and the big red lips of the Rolling Stones. I said, “This was your room?”

Jocelyn pulled open the closet door, and on its inside was a collection of aircraft pictures. I thought of the picture my father kept of him standing next to a captured ME-109 just inside the Westwall. You could see the Dragon’s Teeth of the Siegfried Line in the background. My father often got it out to look at, which caused him to drift off and sort of glaze over. Jocelyn’s pictures were all domestic aircraft, including several like the spray plane she had crashed.

Womack was looking me over from the doorway; I never heard him arrive.

From the window of Jocelyn’s bedroom, as I learned of other rooms in the house, the view was entirely given to abandoned machinery and deer hides of various vintage. The wind was a continuous background sound, never steady but punctuated by the slap of rope against the iron flagpole in the front yard. I had noticed that nothing was designated as a place to park; rather, you kept driving until you got as close to the front door as possible, maybe in deference to weather, but it was surprising to see the front grille of the truck so close to the glass of the living-room window.

When Jocelyn went into the kitchen to put the groceries away, Womack stayed close to me. With one finger, he moved his hair behind an ear and said, “Where you from?”

I said, “Around here.”

“I guess you got room to roam. I could do without the winter myself.”

“You get used to it.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“How about you, Womack?”

“Hobbs, New Mexico, but south of the border is my main deal. Only place I know where you can do what the hell you want.”

“What business are you in exactly?”

“Import export.”

Womack’s tone was annoying me, and I asked him rather sharply. “Importing and exporting what?”

“Anything needs importing and anything needs exporting.”

Jocelyn came back into the room — our conversation was going nowhere anyway except to begin to disclose a mutual dislike. She was taking Womack to the airport and would come straight back — which assertion produced a faint smile on Womack’s archetypally Anglo-Saxon face, his first expression of the day, at least that I had seen: he could have been grinning like a monkey before I met him. I was calculating the time in my head for the round-trip to the airport, and it looked like I was stuck for a couple of hours. I found myself at the front of the truck shaking Womack’s horny hand all over again and reciting formulaic wishes for safe travel. He waited until I’d finished and said, “Pleasure,” like a poker player saying “Fold.” Jocelyn was already at the wheel, and I walked to her side of the truck in the hapless manner I couldn’t seem to shake. She smiled and said, “Womack’s going to Denver to get me an airplane. Don’t you agree that’s thoughtful?” Staring through the windshield, Womack seemed to hear none of this. The several hours that lay before me seemed a very long time. Who were these people? I had the disquieting sense that my being left here was no accident.

I watched them drive off, even giving them an irresolute wave, before turning to my surroundings. I was stuck and forced to make do with mild curiosity about the property and its accumulated detritus. Occupancy of the place was long-standing, I concluded, because a horse-drawn harrow was among the discarded machinery and bundles of rusty barbed wire, broken posts, feed sacks, as well as a small brown plastic TV and an early washing machine. I suspected that the wind blowing over this mess probably never stopped, and I thought about the rural people I had seen in my practice who wanted something to help them with the wind of the Great Plains, a superb marketplace for sedatives.

I couldn’t fathom being left here. It had happened with such routine that its inconvenience dawned on me only after it was too late to do anything about it. I had a house half painted back in town that I wanted to finish. At the moment, I was surprised at how urgently I wanted to paint that house and even paint many more houses. In this isolation, I daydreamed about all the pleasant colors of the houses I could possibly paint. I had tried to get my father to agree to paint our house, but he didn’t think it made any difference whether his house was painted or not. War had greatly reduced the number of things he cared about and home improvement didn’t make the cut. I remembered feeling that my wish to paint the house only revealed how trivial were the values of those of us who hadn’t been to war. I may have been ashamed of wanting to paint our house. I recalled revisiting the colors it could possibly have been and assigning inappropriate attributes to them: cowardly gray, immoral yellow, and so on. Almost all of my father’s stories were war stories, and it wasn’t until I emerged into a wider world — later than most — that war occupied a more usual place in the array of human experiences. Nothing absorbed him so much as unrolling the old silk invasion map of Europe and tracing the roads where he and other infantrymen had followed the tanks east. I did notice during the Vietnam days that returning veterans had a separate society, but not quite like my father’s because they felt unwelcome. I saw some in my practice who seemed almost unreachably forlorn. My father and I were close, and he told me about his life sort of in secret since my mother was sick of the whole thing and generally focused on her spiritual education, which consisted mostly of fires, floods, perdition, and inestimable glory.

The only room that had a clean bed was Jocelyn’s childhood room. The old man’s bed was stripped of its clothes and mice had nested right in the middle of it. It appeared that Jocelyn and Womack had stayed in her old room. I thought that after a walk I might nap there and think about that. I wasn’t in so deep I couldn’t be objective.

I took a walk up the coulee that led south from the ranch and kept me out of the west wind sweeping the prairie and the juniper savannah. At a muddy spring surrounded by willows I surprised a brood of wild turkeys, camouflaged young pullets, which left the spring in no great hurry and even continued feeding as they ascended. A grove of chokecherries made a nice protected place to rest and so I stretched out and watched the clouds. Today was a day of high-traveling altocumulus: they were crossing the earth, and watching their departure to the east pleased me. I understood that meeting different ground conditions might cause them to halt their travels and simply disappear — they were not like trains leaving the station. My mother believed that heaven was overhead, and imperfectly understood even by the faithful. When I was a child I stared into the blue sky trying to see it, believing — since it provided so many rewards to the saved — that it must have a few nice facilities, but I could never quite see them. My mother hadn’t conveyed enough of her cosmology to make me see that the Rapture was a state that didn’t require furnishing. At some remote place I was a man of faith. “Creation” was as good a word for what mattered as any other.

I returned to the house and immediately looked for something to eat. The refrigerator contained a discouraging collection of energy drinks and snack foods, none of which appealed to me. This must have been the crap brought in by Womack. Next to a well-worn armchair a stack of magazines rose several feet from the floor, Drovers’ Journal, American Rifleman, and an ancient copy of the Playboy with centerfold of Bettie Page, the pinup girl with the geometric black bangs. The American Rifleman profiled one Elmer Keith, a sourpuss in a ten-gallon hat and a meerschaum pipe who tested his guns on horses. I flopped them all back on the pile, went into Jocelyn’s room, stretched out, and fell asleep. I didn’t mean to fall asleep, but I started replaying some of the better clouds — I realized I was still ranking them — and drifted off. Probably I dreamed. I don’t know.

I woke up very briefly disoriented because Jocelyn was sitting on the edge of the bed smiling at me. My first feeling, that this was a bit awkward, left me perplexed, as though sleep had transported me to someplace unfamiliar. I resorted to a banality: “You just get back?”

“Womack’s plane was late. I didn’t want to leave until I was sure he was on his way. You were in a deep sleep. Have any dreams?”

“One. Painting a house.”

“That’s not much of a dream.”

“No?”

“No. A dream should be about hope.”

“Well, I hope to paint this house.” I immediately regretted saying this, since I had no interest in explaining why I was painting a house or my enthusiasm for the task, which I inadequately comprehended anyway. In fact, with Jocelyn sitting so close, the idea of spending the day rolling enamel on clapboard had lost much of its romance. “I suppose I ought to get up.”

“You in a hurry to get someplace?” I said I was in no hurry to get someplace. “Good, then stay where you are.”

I thought it had become obvious what was going to happen. With the slightest tug on the edge of her blouse, I encouraged her to recline next to me. With my face in her hair I found I was not wrong about the smell. Probably it was nothing but shampoo but I was swept away by this cosmetic product. I ruefully considered that I could have gone into a grocery store, opened a bottle of the stuff, and saved myself a lot of trouble. Jocelyn wiggled amiably, sighed, and said this was nice; but before we got off on some sibling nap, I slid my hand over the gentle curve of her belly, then held one of her breasts, firm as a chalice. Jocelyn turned around sharply and stared straight into my eyes.

“What’s going on here?”

She didn’t say anything. We were very still for a long period of thought, at the end of which she abruptly got up and announced she was taking me home. I sat on the edge of the bed, running both hands through my hair, trying to revive the thrill of house painting. But as we retraced the road back through Harlowton and turned south toward the Absaroka Mountains, she talked about her life growing up, the early departure of her mother, her dislike of her father, and finally of the place itself. I found hope: maybe the house was the problem! But in this too I was mistaken. She dropped me at my door and said, “You’ve got my number. Put on a clean shirt and take me someplace nice.”

I resumed work on the nice old folks’ house. I bought a few things — a couple of scrapers in different sizes, some paper dust masks, a pair of coveralls — but everything else, starting with the ladder, I had to rent. I was more than a little aware of the escapism of my house painting endeavor: I didn’t need the money, I didn’t need the job. But what was wrong with escapism? I was in a situation that made escape in every form entirely attractive.

The ladder, an aluminum extension type, I raised to its full length and rested between the two upper windows on the sunlit clapboard of a cool, sunny morning. Ascending the first two rungs revealed the old couple gazing into my face; I freed one hand and gave them a friendly wave before climbing past their window. With each rung I had a new view of the sun making its way through the lawns and alleys of the town. Higher and higher I climbed, until an intimation of eternity infused my survey of rooftops. The chimneys were wonderfully individualized: some straight and tall, some listing to one side, some brick and wrapped in silvery flashing. A pair of schoolchildren stopped at the base of the ladder and gazed rung by rung until they found me and gave uncertain waves before moving on, occasionally punching each other or trying to grab each other’s hat. As the sun rose, I could smell the wood warming before my face, a pleasant smell that intensified as I scraped the curled old paint away until it showered and fluttered to the ground.

By the end of the day I had prepared the front of the house and started on the north side, which was less forgiving: the wood was damp from shade and the paint clung to it, requiring more diligent scraping that sometimes sent the tool astray and gouging into the soft material underneath. When it started to cool and I felt too tired to continue, I descended the ladder and made a neat array of my tools, masks, and gloves, which I covered with a plastic sheet weighted down with rocks.

Then, still in my rumpled white coveralls, I walked to the cemetery, pruning shears in my pocket and wearing a paper hat I had picked up at the paint store from a bin of promotional paper hats. I chose one with a Rottweiler on the front (I liked dogs) without realizing that it advertised a condom popular with the hip-hop culture and urged the viewer, “Don’t be slippin’ in yo pimpin’” on one side and “Get yo freak on” on the other. In fact, I was oblivious until I noticed the excitement it created among young people along my way to the cemetery. I went on wearing it out of defiance despite the great urge to throw it away. I wished I had picked the “Do yo thang” hat I’d first spotted, but it lacked the dog picture.

The summer annuals at my parents’ graves were still managing better than any of the others I saw, and I reflected on the proprietary smugness I had acquired since first looking after this small place. In fact, it had attained something of the quality of home ground through my care, and it was hard to avoid thinking of how it might be improved. I was sure that anyone visiting family burial places looked back on their own lives as set against the time when the now dead were living. Surely that was what such visits did. At the edge of this cemetery was a small stream where I’d once fished, almost militantly, when I was expected to be doing something else.

I’d had an aquarium which I stocked by investing my savings in tropical fish that I carried home from the pet shop in Billings on the Greyhound bus in plastic bags. It was a thrill to hold those bags to the flashing light of the highway and watch the aquatic denizens within, the tetras, guppies, swordtails, gouramis, and the little catfish that was guaranteed to keep the sides of the aquarium clean. Eventually I just wanted to go fishing, to see the native fish of my world, and since this fervor coincided with my rapidly declining interest in religion, my mother concluded that unseen and possibly malign principles were at play. One Sunday as I headed out the door with my fishing rod, she confronted me about going to church. Addressing her in the elevated diction I affected at the time, I said, “An hour with those fanatics would seem like a lifetime.” She gazed at me, tears in her eyes and, calling me her angel, asked if I was able to remember that she was one of them. This was the first time that I found you could go fishing while feeling blue. I didn’t forgive myself for speaking so to the only mother I would ever have, but in the small zigzag stream that traversed a bird-filled swamp at the edge of town I seemed to dissolve into a larger reality in which acts of meanness could be isolated, examined, then joined to plans for not repeating them. It’s possible that my association of church and fishing, though admittedly unoriginal, began there and that on Sundays I still felt upon awakening the need to be fishing. I don’t think I ever imagined when crossing the cemetery with my fishing rod that I would one day find my mother and father there.

I walked to my house, discarded my paint clothes and the stupid hat, picked up my rod, and went back to fish that small creek burbling through a woodlot that, entangled in an absentee estate, had for generations avoided being turned into tract houses. It was almost as if I were addressing my late parents: “Look, I’m still doing this.” With my rod, a pillbox of flies, and shoes I didn’t mind soaking, I loved the deceit of this little waterway, presenting itself along the sidewalk as a trickle, no more than runoff, then expanding to something you could jump across but carrying enough spring water to undercut its own banks. Only a single pool formed, turning slowly in the roots of old spruce trees, before the stream resumed its deception by emerging from the woodlot alongside a grocery store parking lot, on its way out of town.

I backed into the brush beside the pool and pulled line from the reel, holding the small gray fly between thumb and forefinger. I stood motionless as a heron and watched the dark surface of the pool. It moved, quite slowly, as part of the stream. Perhaps it was an hour before the first mayflies popped on the surface and drifted away. There were never many, but in the end a trout appeared to dine, making small drifting rings on the surface — at first opportunistically, then when the flies became more numerous, the fish fed in a regular rhythm. I cast and caught it, and held the beautiful trout with the delight I once felt holding my plastic bag of fish to the lights speeding past the Greyhound. I let it go. Then in sloshing shoes, I headed for my parents’ graves but never quite arrived there: a woman was arranging flowers at the graves of Cody and Clarice, and I stopped to watch her.